Let's be clear: Agile Boston's
mission is to encourage & help the Greater
Boston Agile community to become the most active, most
innovative & most vibrant Agile learning community
on the planet, by any measure that can be named.

Teams
are slow to take up the full authority granted by Scrum.
The artful Scrum Master
makes sure no one else grabs any Team authority before
the Team fully "takes up" the higher authorization
Scrum provides.

We are Agile Boston. We
meet for Agile training events, one per month. We are
dedicated to spreading Agile methods and thinking through
the software development community in greater Boston.
We meet in Waltham MA on the 4th Wednesday, except for
August and
December....click here to
send us an email about absolutely anything on your mind
now.

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Welcome to the Agile Boston web
site !!

Our average meeting
has over 80 attending
!!

We run AGILE
BOSTON OPEN SPACE on
04/28/2010 and get over 250++ individuals
attending !! We charge JUST $29-- and it includes
lunch !!

We are Agile Boston. We
meet for Agile training events, one per month. We are
dedicated to spreading Agile
methods
and thinking
through the software development community in Boston.
We adhere to Scrum values. We meet
Waltham MA on the 4th Wednesday, except for August and
December....

The primary best practice
in Agile software development is Scrum¡ªa
set of methods, roles and rules that can increase software
developer productivity by 10
times if you are willing to follow the simple rules.
We teach
and discuss Scrum and the art and science behind it.
We also cover Test Driven Development, XP and other
best-practices under the Agile umbrella.

Experienced Agile practitioners
from throughout Boston attend and present at
our meetings.
We have educational presentations, a focus on Scrum training,
and some informal networking time. We also have some
very
interesting
group-level exercises in which we develop expertise and
empirical
experience in Agile and Scrum.

The leader of the group
is Dan Mezick. You can learn more about Dan on this
web site. Dan is a Scrum Coach
who is an invited speaker to events like Agile2007,
Agile2008 and Agile2009. Learn more about Dan here

Anyone can attend a meeting
provided you are willing to participate in making the
meeting
a success.
We run
mock exercises at the group level that are a lot of
fun. Most of these revolve around Scrum tasks like planning,
estimating and running Sprints. If you are looking
for
a very fun way to learn to more and more about Agile
and Scrum, this is the place.

Any serious Scrum implementation must pass the NOKIA TEST before using advanced techniques such as Scrum-of-Scrums. Are you ready?

This test is the STARTING point for implementing
advanced Scrum techniques such as multiple teams
working from the same backlog.

According to the NOKIA TEST for Scrum, you are doing
Scrum, if:

Iterations. You
must be doing iterative development cycle of
6 weeks or less.

Testing.You must be testing
as you develop software, and preferably, writing
tests IN ADVANCE of development.

Agile Specification via
User Stories. You'll
want to be using user stories for requirements,
keeping them small, independent, and testable.

Product Owner. You
have one, preferably with a Release Plan,
and one that writes the User Stories.

Product Backlog. You
have one, PRIORITIZED by business ROI. Ideally,
you an measure ROI based on real revenue, cost
per Story Point, or othr metrics.

Estimates. You
have estimates, developed by the WHOLE TEAM,
ideally by using Planning Poker.

Burndown Chart. You
have one! It is updated every day of a Sprint,
and you report Stories, not Tasks, since Tasks
are not a measure on "done-ness".

Team Disruption. You have
only Scrum roles consisting of Product Owner,
Team and Scrum master, and
NO ONE is disturbing the Team as they work
on the current Sprint.

SUMMARY

Scrum is simple to describe and hard to follow.
It has the following structure:

Three Roles. The three Scrum roles are Product Owner,
ScrumMaster, and Team. That's it!

Three Ceremonies. You have three main meetings
in Scrum: the Sprint Planning meeting,
the Sprint Review, and the Daily Scrum
stand-up.

Three Artifacts. You have three essential documents
in Scrum- The Product Backlog, the Sprint
backlog, and the Burndown Chart. Remember
that the main item is the User Story, estimated
in Story Points......

Three Best Practices. Scrum as of 2008 now defines
THREE best practices: the use of User Stories,
the use of Planning Poker, and the use
of the Scrum board.